Specs HD5870 1GB/2GB and HD5850 1G

We finally figured out out the final specification of the chip that we called RV870 and the fact that AMD plans to call it Radeon HD 5870 doesn’t come as a big surprise. The chip works at 825MHz and has 1600 shaders, two times more than RV770 which indicates that the chip is two times faster than the year old RV770.

The chip has as mmany as 2.1 billion transistors and is more than twice the number the RV770 packs, which has 956 million transistors. The card uses GDDR5 memory clocked at 1.3GHz (5.2GHz in quad mode) and can provide more than 150GB/second bandwidth. The power of this card stays at 180W while in idle the power drops down to 27W, three times less than the 90W on 4870.

By a rough specification-based estimate, the Radeon HD 5870 could end up two times faster than the Radeon HD 4870 but realistically, you should expect the new card to be faster by about 60 percent across the board.

As you can imagine, ATI's Radeon HD 5850 card is a slower and crippled version of the Radeon HD 5870 and this slower card has 1440 shaders and runs at 725MHz.

The Radeon HD 5870 has 1600 shaders and runs at 825MHz. GDDR5 memory runs at 1000MHz compared to 1300MHz on the 5870 card and this results in a memory bandwidth of 136GB/s, which is more than the HD 4870.

Just like the Radeon HD 5870, this card comes with 32ROPs and the maximum power consumption is 170W under load and 27W when idle. The launch date is September 23rd.

We received some details about the name of the chip that ATI codenamed Cypress which we have called RV870. The internal generation codename is Evergreen and this name represents the entire DirectX 11 generation of ATI cards.

The top card is named Radeon HD 5870 but the company plans two versions, one with 2GB memory and one with 1GB.

The Radeon HD 5870 1GB should sell for $399 at launch, while Radeon HD 5870 2GB should sell for $449. At the same time, the slower Radeon HD 5850 with 1GB memory will sell for $299. The launch date for all three cards is September 23rd in Europe whereas in the US we are talking about the 22nd.